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John took the Metro to the Basilique de Saint-Denis, the first Gothic cathedral ever, to think.
Emily had questioned his motives. What are my motives? Think, man! He sat in a chair facing the altar, under the vaulted ceiling. He had said he wanted her to live with him so he’d have some sort of success. What was wrong with that? It was true. Why was that not good enough? Think!
So he would feel successful. Okay, that’s a selfish motivation. What’s not a selfish motivation?
Emily wanted to be loved just for her. That should have been my motive. That and success? No, that’s mixing the selfish back in.
And he had made it about his feelings of failure. What a bastard, no wonder she’d said no.
What an astucieuse girl! He felt so proud of her. And now this wonderful kid wouldn’t live with him. You are a failure—he could hear his father’s voice.
John stood and walked around the basilica, nearly one thousand years old, built around the ruins of a chapel built five hundred years before that. French legend had it that St. Denis was beheaded on Montmartre—the mountain of martyrs, picked up his head and walked here. Unlike St. Denis, John had never been a praying man, but he thought of the millions of prayers that had gone up through these vaulted ceilings over the last millennium. Prayers for babies who were sick, husbands who were drunk, jobs, food, the next meal.
He paid to enter the crypt and see the tomb of Marie Antoinette. He hoped he’d stop being foolish, as she had been—in different ways, of course. But still foolish.
He’d better start living and working smarter so he wouldn’t come to an equally disastrous end. Like his father.
